Font Management is essential for any designer who uses more than just a handful of fonts. As many designers know, if you keep all the fonts activated at the same time, it uses more system resources, making any mac and its applications run slow. Font Management allows to activate fonts for the time that you actually need them. We get fonts from all the place: Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Quark – just to mention the fonts that get installed with the applications that we use every day. To this, you need to add the fonts you purchase and use for client projects. With a good Font Management system, you can find, sort, preview, activate/deactivate fonts as you go. If I hadn’t look more into Font Management, I would be lost!
After this tweet from @curtismchale (and going back and forth a few times) I decided to right this article about Font Management. I started really looking into Font Management a few years ago, just before heading to the InDesign Conference in Miami back in 2008. I was using Font Book from OS X since it became available, but the Adobe and Macromedia apps integration was flawed and not very efficient. Font Book would ask for missing fonts in documents, but wouldn’t “call” them for activation. This would take time specially if I was working on several projects at once. At the conference, I got the hint about (then free version) Linotype FontExplorer X. I immediately fell in love with the application, and let’s face it, there were not any functional, affordable or pretty Font Management applications for OS X. I could create collections, sets and manage them all from FontExplorer and not worry about how the fonts would be called from the apps. After a while, FontExplorer X went from free to paid, so I went back for a while to Font Book. I couldn’t get used to the downgrade so I started a quest to find a cheaper replacement to cover all my needs.
I tested just two applications: FontCase and FontExplorer X Pro. There are two other solid and good applications that I’ve tried before but didn’t test back then. My reasons where that both FontAgent Pro and Suitcase Fusion had the same features as FontExplorer and since they cost the same, I already felt comfortable enough with what I knew. Researching for this article, I found a couple of nifty features from Suitcase Fusion that I would love to see ported to FontExplorer X: Find Similar Fonts by selecting any font in your collection, Suitcase Fusion does a glyph-level comparison of all fonts in your collection to locate similar fonts. And Web Page Previews, to test/preview fonts on sites before purchasing. Now, moving on to my comments from each of the two tested apps.
Fontcase
Developed by Bohemian Coding, Fontcase is a slick, pretty looking, functional and intuitive Font Management. However, I found that with a overly large and extensive font collection it will become slugish. It is indeed the iTunes for Font Management. It displays a preview of your activated and deactivated fonts, like iTunes would do with a cover. You can Tag fonts, group them in collections, smart folders and sort them by languages. When an applications needs a font that’s inactive, FontCase can activate it for you, keeping track which fonts were auto-activated and it will deactivate those when you quit Fontcase. There’s an option (for InDesign only though) to deactivate those fonts when closing documents. You can compare fonts not only with sample text, but complete paragraphs. Also, you can share (via Bonjour) your font collection to other macs in your household or office, making it easier to work as a team. But this is not just plain sharing, it’s preview and download fonts from shared libraries. you don’t need a server since it’s already built in. You can password protect it, share just select collections, control if you allow font downloads from others and look for shared libraries (as you would in iTunes). You can also look for duplicate fonts and make beautiful print outs of your fonts (previews and metadata). One thing that it does not have though, it’s a built in font store. Some other functions like Maintenance, are run through plug-ins (available at the plug-in page) made from both Bohemian Coding and other font case users. This application has much room to grow, and for the amateur font user or a designer that doesn’t require many specifics on Font Management, this is their winning choice.
OS X 10.5 and greater are supported.
Pricing:
- Single user – $53 (Can be used by on e person on up to 5 Macs)
- Family pack – $87 (Can be used for up to 5 Macs or family members)
- Business pack – $251 (For up to 15 Macs or 15 people within the same company)
FontExplorer X Pro
Linotype (Europe and rest of the world) and Monotype Imaging (US) got together and gave life to FontExplorer X. When I launched it the first time after using Fontcase for a month, I felt right back at home. I had been using the free version for nearly two years, and became more than used to it, so yes, I was home. Not only this is serious Font Management, but you can use folders, tags and smart sets to make it your own back yard. And like it says on the site, the software is designed to be as unobtrusive as possible – and I love it. Keeping up with the game, this app has also Print functionality, making it easy to print a detailed sample of the typefaces through templates (preformatted and customizable through drag and drop). One of my favorite features from the app is Auto-activation for InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop (also available QuarkXPress). You also get control of how Font Explorer reacts when certain applications start up. For example, I can make a set to get active every time I start up Illustrator or InDesign. You have smart sets already created (under the Library Menu) that can help you on your every day design and management: System Fonts, System Collections (from Font Book), Last Imported and Conflicts. You can choose how to address those conflicts and get them out of the way, from duplicates, to fonts no longer in the Finder or Fonts with missing printer-font files. You also have an Activation Control center, that allows you to see all the application sets (mentioned before) as well as Font requests and Activations (Fonts activated Permanently, until quit or Log out). They also have a built in store that can keep track of your purchase history, favorites and a shopping cart. For font usability, you don’t have big paragraphs like in Fontcase, but you get an extensive selection of Preview Samples that you can change at will and customize on the go for a quick preview of single words or phrases. With careful importing handling and exporting options, you get a robust set of features from this app: for example, when importing a duplicate, FontExplorer asks if you want to keep the current font or the new one. And yoou can keep the Finder folder structure of your fonts. Me? I let the app make sense of them under it’s own folder. You can monitor fonts for incompatibility, duplicates and major activating, deactivating and exporting fonts. What would a mac app would be without backups? You can backup your configuration (and load if porting from another mac) and you can also backup your entire library. This backup includes the fonts, folder and smart set structures, labels, ratings and preferences. Another nice feature is that you can Clean and Organize your Fonts folder (and review those orphan fonts that always sneak around), Clean both System and Application Font Caches.
Supported Systems OS X 10.4.x, 10.5.x and 10.6.x
Pricing:
- FontExplorer X Pro, a $79 standalone font manager;
- FontExplorer X Server, which uses FontExplorer X Pro as a front-end client. For pricing, you must contact them.
Final Choice
My personal choice was FontExplorer. All around, this is the go-to app if you want to get into serious Font Management. It gave me all the tools I needed, peace of mind and amazing performance. I’m currently using it with CS4 and they plugins are already updated to CS5.
Final advice: Test run them all. You’ll know after a couple of weeks if it’s the right app for you. I did my research and figured that these two are what I wanted to try out. Don’t be afraid of test them all, just don’t do it at once– make sure to install and uninstall the apps as directed and always always backup your font collection before any trial version testing.
On a quick side note and bonus fact, @Vonster pointed out that @Hicksdesign created the Font Explorer brand icons. You can see more of the project here.